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Aquaponics and Health

Recently we had the good fortune of discovering a book on our doorstep. It was a gift from Matt Kilby the tree man whom we wrote about recently. Matt is into planting forests of trees around Australia and after a recent health scare – is now into good health and sent us Victoria Boutenko’s “Green for Life” book.

Her book deals basically in the health benefits of drinking blended green smoothies everyday and why you should seek to lower your bodies pH level to be more alkaline.
Boutenko’s book goes on to explain how blending a wide mixture of greens and drinking them will maximise your bodies potential to withstand disease.

Sounds fair enough. We’ve all heard these familiar stories. What made it more interesting to us was how similar the human body was portrayed to an aquaponics system.
A passage in the book reminded us about how oxygen in a flood and drain media bed system invigorates the plant roots and stimulates the good bacteria to work at building healthy plant tissue.

Over eighty years ago, Otto Warburg was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery that cancer is caused by weakened cell respiration due to a lack of oxygen at the cellular level. According to Warburg, damaged cell respiration causes fermentation, resulting in low pH (acidity) at the cellular level.

Dr Otto Warburg

Dr. Warburg, in his Nobel Prize–winning study, illustrated the environment of the cancer cell. A normal healthy cell undergoes an adverse change when it can no longer take in oxygen to convert glucose into energy. In the absence of oxygen, the cell reverts to a primal nutritional program to nourish itself by converting glucose through the process of fermentation. The lactic acid produced by fermentation lowers the cell’s pH (acid-alkaline balance) and destroys the ability of DNA and RNA to control cell division. The cancer cells then begin to multiply. The lactic acid simultaneously causes severe local pain as it destroys cell enzymes. Cancer appears as a rapidly growing external cell covering with a core of dead cells.

Dr. Otto Warburg finished one of his most famous speeches with the following statement: “Nobody today can say that one does not know what cancer and its prime cause is. On the contrary, there is no disease whose prime cause is better known, so that today ignorance is no longer an excuse that one cannot do more about prevention.”
Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize for showing that cancer thrives in anaerobic (without oxygen), or acidic, conditions. In other words, the main cause of cancer is acidity of the human body.

Anaerobic Dead Zones

If you have read about Aquaponics you will notice a similar refrain about keeping pH within acceptable boundaries to best encourage plants to take up nutrients and thrive. Well oxygenated aquaponics systems prevent anaerobic bacteria from building up and dead zones appearing in your gravel media systems. We go into this in a lot more depth in our Aquaponics Secrets DVD. Maybe the similarity between how you body’s cell system functions and how aquaponics systems work is merely coincidental. But its an intriguing thought that makes you wonder that we spend a lot of time researching how to make an aquaponics system work so well but fail to give a passing thought how well we oxygenate our own body?

Boutenko’s book goes further into the realm of plant pH. If we can understand an aquaponic’s system ideal pH range (around 6.5 to 7.2) then what about the pH signature of the plants you grow and eat? Apparently every plant has a pH value. Your body depending what you eat also carries a pH signature and varies on what you ingest.

She says:

It makes great sense to me that children should study the pH index of all foods at school and that all foods sold to the public should have their pH index printed on the content label together with calories and nutrients. For example, Parmesan cheese should have a red warning label with a pH sign saying it is extremely acid forming, at -34, while spinach would have a golden medal sign with a pH index of +14, as an excellent alkalizing food.

Smoothies

We all know eating raw green vegetables are good for us but acknowledging that point and chewing through aimlessly through heaps of green vegetable matter seems a tad unappetizing if motivation is your problem.

The good news is if you run an aquaponics system, all that leafy green vegetable matter can be easily turned into a smoothie very quickly with a food blender.

We’ve had miles of water-cress, spinach, lettuce and kale that we now process each morning. Mix a few pieces of apple, pears and banana to sweeten the taste and down the hatch it goes.

Drinking green smoothies is up to you how many ingredients you use. It certainly changes the way you view your aquaponics system.

Its no longer just a fresh fish and vegetable production system, but a medicinal herb system to boot.

There are all kinds of medicinal plants that are also alkalaine you can research that are meant to be also good for you that wont keep if picked or stored in supermarkets or turned into pills. Lets keep those food enzymes charged with life.

Pick ’em, blend them and drink ’em.

Being able to stroll up to your aquaponics system and pick your health brew to be blended moments later – is a great way to start the day.

2 Comments

Dec23

deniz

I liken eating a ‘RaLF’ diet to mulching and compost-teaing. Our bodies are like soil. Once it is brought to an optimum level (a stable pH), it gets easier to just do regular and seasonal mulching. The system continues to take care of itself with minimum effort. We are nature 🙂